Distributed Software Engineering Research Articles

A Decentralized Framework for Managing Task Allocation in Distributed Software Engineering

In distributed software development, planning and managing fair and transparent task allocation is both critical and challenging. The objective of this paper is to propose a decentralized blockchain-oriented, transparent task allocation framework to improve the quality of the task allocation process. It addresses the concerns of (i) enhancing collaboration, (ii) inhibiting knowledge vaporization, and (iii) reducing documentation problems. The proposed method is a novel two-fold process: First, it identifies and categorizes tasks exhibiting different dependencies and complexities to create equal task clusters based on their dependency type, difficulty, cost, and time. Second, it uses a blockchain-oriented framework to broadcast, check bid validity, allow developers to bid on tasks matching their roles and expertise, evaluate, and announce the winner for task allocation using smart contracts. Results of experimentation, surveys, and interviews with software practitioners conclude that the proposed solution is transparent and effective in allocating tasks (with Cranach’s alpha of 0.894) at a low cost of contract execution in a distributed software development environment. Overall, the proposed approach will have a positive and significant impact in industrial settings.

Taking a Studio Course in Distributed Software Engineering from a Large Local Cohort to a Small Global Cohort

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places small teams of students on different features of a common product. This creates two layers of collaboration, as students work within their teams on individual features, and the teams must interoperate with many other teams on the common product. The class uses continuous integration practices and predominantly asynchronous communication channels (Slack and GitHub) to facilitate this collaboration. The original goal of this design was to ensure that students would authentically experience issues associated with realistically sized software projects, and learn to apply appropriate software engineering and collaboration practices to overcome them, in a course without significant extra staffing. Data from the development logs showed that most commits take place outside synchronous class hours, and the project operates as a temporally distributed team even though the students are geographically co-located. Since 2015, a course adapted from this format has also been taught at the University of New England (UNE), an Australian regional university that is also a longstanding provider of distance education. In this course, most students study online, and the class has to be able to work globally, because as well as students taking part from around Australia, there are also typically a small number of students taking part from overseas. Transferring the course to a smaller but predominantly online institution has allowed us to evaluate the distributed nature of the course, by considering what aspects of the course needed to change to support students who are geographically distributed, and comparing how the two cohorts behave. This has produced an overall course design, to teach professional distributed software engineering practices, that is adaptable from large classes to small, and from local to global.

Measuring social networks when forming information system project teams

Abstract Despite the advances in the project management field, little is known about how creating performing software teams in a systematical and repeatable way. The technical dimension is not enough to achieve this. Software development is a complex collaborative process where people and interpersonal relationships – i.e., how people interact, behave and organize – significantly influence the project success. In this paper, we define a framework to assign people to projects from this socio-technical perspective. Social networks characterizing the interplay between teammates are built and analyzed to predict productive collaborations and identify adequate team-members depending on the organization needs and the kind of project. A noteworthy novelty of these social networks is that they estimate compatibility between coworkers according to previous collaborations, but also according to individuals’ social skills. This allows analyzing the compatibility among people who have not worked together before. We present results of using the proposed framework in a multinational corporation during a more-than-two-year period. Our in-company experiments emphasize that we can significantly improve the expected outcomes characterizing and measuring the social interaction among coworkers. Social aspects discussed may be highly relevant in the context of distributed software engineering, since it implies new challenges in the interplay among coworkers.

A New Approach for Distributed Software Engineering Teams Based on Kanban Method for Reducing Dependency

A New Approach for Distributed Software Engineering Teams Based on Kanban Method for Reducing Dependency

Domain model-driven software engineering: A method for discovery of dependency links

ContextDependency management often suffers from labor intensity and complexity in creating and maintaining the dependency relations in practice. This is even more critical in a distributed development, in which developers are geographically distributed and a wide variety of tools is used. In those settings, different interpretations of software requirements or usage of different terminologies make it challenging to predict the change impact. Objectiveis (a) to describe a method facilitating change management in geographically distributed software engineering by effective discovery and establishment of dependency links using domain models; (b) to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. MethodA domain model, providing a common reference point, is used to manage development objects and to automatically support dependency discovery. We propose to associate (annotate) development objects with the concepts from the model. These associations are used to compute dependency among development objects, and are stepwise refined to direct dependency links (i.e. enabling product traceability). To evaluate the method, we conducted a laboratory-based randomized experiment on two real cases. Six participants were using an implemented prototype and two comparable tools to perform simulated tasks. ResultsIn the paper we elaborate on the proposed method discussing its functional steps. Results from the experiment show that the method can be effectively used to assist in discovery of dependency links. Users have discovered on average fourteen percent more dependency links than by using the comparable tools. ConclusionsThe proposed method advocates the use of domain models throughout the whole development life-cycle and is apt to facilitate multi-site software engineering. The experimental study and results suggest that the method is effective in the discovery of dependencies among development objects.

A TRANSFORMATION APPROACH FOR COLLABORATION BASED REQUIREMENT MODELS

Distributed software engineering is widely recognized as a complex task. Among the inherent complexities is the process of obtaining a system design from its global requirement specification. This paper deals with such transformation process and suggests an approach to derive the behavior of a given system components, in the form of distributed Finite State Machines, from the global system requirements, in the form of an augmented UML Activity Diagrams notation. The process of the suggested approach is summarized in three steps: the definition of the appropriate source Meta-Model (requirements Meta-Model), the definition of the target Design Meta-Model and the definition of the rules to govern the transformation during the derivation process. The derivation process transforms the global system requirements described as UML diagram activities (extended with collaborations) to system roles behaviors represented as UML finite state machines. The approach is implemented using Atlas Transformation Language (ATL).

A Transformation Approach for Collaboration Based Requirement Models

Distributed software engineering is widely recognized as a complex task. Among the inherent complexities is the process of obtaining a system design from its global requirement specification. This paper deals with such transformation process and suggests an approach to derive the behavior of a given system components, in the form of distributed Finite State Machines,from the global system requirements, in the form of an augmented UML Activity Diagrams notation. The process of the suggested approach is summarized in three steps: the definition of the appropriate source Meta -Model (requirements Meta Model), the definition of the target Design Meta-Model and the definition of the rules to govern the transformation during the derivation process. The derivation process transforms the global system requirements described as UML diagram activities (extended with collaborati ons) to system roles behaviors represented as UML finite state machines. The approach is implemented using Atlas Transformation Language (ATL).

Methodological reflections on a field study of a globally distributed software project

Context: We describe the methodology of a field study of a globally distributed software development project in a multinational corporation. The project spanned four sites in the US and one in India, and is a representative example of the complexities and intricacies of global corporate software development. Objective: Our goal is to provide the rationale behind the methodological choices and derive insights to inform the methodology of future studies of global software engineering teams. The paper also aims to provide an illustrative case of a typical geographically distributed corporate software project, through an in-depth description that emerged by applying the methods. Method: We reflect upon the reasons for choosing each of our methods, viz., non-participant observation, site visits, interviews, and an online questionnaire. We then discuss what we learned from the experience of applying the methods. Results: During and after the study, the discussions surrounding our methodological choices yielded important insights. The dynamics of software engineering practice and the geographical distribution of the project impacted factors such as access, costs, and cultural and linguistic diversity, and influenced the choice of methods. Our experience makes a case for methodological breadth and plurality as a means to a broad understanding of a global project. This understanding could then be linked to the specific research questions under consideration. Conclusion: The in-depth contextual description of the project that emerged from our methods highlights the utility of our methodological approach and provides an illustration of the complex nature of these projects. Our systematic reflection also yielded several methodological insights and provides important implications for future empirical studies of global corporate software development. Our experience can serve as a useful resource in methodological choices for research on globally distributed software engineering teams, or collaborative knowledge work in general.

Agile methods for software practice transformation

In a large-scale distributed complex software engineering environment, the ability to rapidly evaluate and improve software engineering practices can be a key market differentiator. Practices that shorten the development cycle, cost-effectively improve quality, and align software with customer needs can have a direct impact on the business value delivered by the enterprise. The IBM Quality Software Engineering (QSE) organization motivates and enables teams across IBM business units and geographies to adopt recommended software engineering practices. QSE has historically established communities and used well-known organizational change management principles to help teams adopt and use recommended practices. In 2008 and 2009, QSE discovered that blending well-known organizational change management principles with agile software development principles enables communities to more consistently deliver significant value to their members. QSE Communities use Scrum, which is an agile project management framework, to prioritize their work on the basis of the communities' needs, plan their work every two weeks and then deliver value at the end of every two-week Sprint (iteration), demonstrate results, and obtain feedback and continuously improve by reflecting and identifying improvement actions at the end of each Sprint. Combining Scrum with proven steps to organizational change management has allowed QSE to rapidly motivate and enable software engineering improvements across IBM.

On preparing students for distributed software development with a synchronous, collaborative development platform

Working remotely is becoming the norm for both professionals and students alike. Software development has become a global industry due to outsourcing, teleworking, flex time, and companies' desire to use the best and/or most economical talent regardless of where that talent is located. Professionals are not alone because students usually work from home despite having sufficient resources on campus. In this paper we share our experiences from using Jazz, a synchronous, collaborative development platform, with our inevitably distributed software engineering students. Eleven students optionally used the tool while working on a five-week team project. Students primarily used the version control, chat, and work item features in Jazz. We collected their reactions in retrospective essays and found that all Jazz students supported using Jazz in future semesters of the course. We also examined grade differences and found that the students who used Jazz were more successful than those who did not use Jazz.

Guidelines for effective eridging in global software engineering

AbstractGlobally distributed software engineering involves one or more of geographic, temporal or cultural distances, which empirical studies find have deleterious effects on the efficiency of the software engineering process. There have been some successful examples where one ‘bridge’ location has facilitated collaboration and coordination across the other locations. Managers might want to use this bridging as a tactic for future projects, even when future collaborations may be composed of very different participants and in different locations and contexts than current successfully bridged teams. However, group behaviour is complicated and establishing an effective bridge is neither a simple nor a straightforward step. We propose a set of guidelines, based on empirical findings, to help managers understand what to expect from the bridging tactic. These include cultural, organizational, individual and temporal factors as well as insights into the costs and benefits of bridging. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Open Source Drives Innovation

The free and open source software movement has had phenomenal impact on the industry evolution. Alongside its important technological innovations, FOSS has sparked novel business models, intellectual property strategies, and software development paradigms. This article reflects on FOSS achievements and provides practical guidelines for leveraging its strengths and mitigating its risks. FOSS also changed the way we develop software. Many current engineering processes have evolved from the way open source is developed. This holds for iterative development and agile techniques as well as globally distributed software engineering

A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software

Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS). All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too “fibrous” to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens. In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project’s hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices.

Engineering distributed software

The role of structure in specifying, designing, analysing, constructing and evolving software has been the central theme of our research in Distributed Software Engineering. This structural discipline dictates formalisms and techniques that are compositional, components that are context independent and systems that can be constructed and evolved incrementally. This extended abstract overviews our development of a structural approach to engineering distributed software and gives indications of our future work which moves from explicit to implicit structural specification. With the benefit of hindsight we attempt to give a "rational history" to our research.

Student communication challenges in distributed software engineering environments

We investigate Non-Face-to-Face (NFtF) distributed collaboration in a population for which technology poses no barrier-students involved in distributed software engineering via Distance Learning. Our study finds students believe themselves significantly less effective in this environment because of lack of traditional non-verbal cues, in partial agreement with previous work. Based on our results, we identify potential problems and present activities to mitigate these so that NFtF oriented interactions may be made more effective for this group.

Flexible consistency checking

The problem of managing the consistency of heterogeneous, distributed software engineering documents is central to the development of large and complex systems. We show how this problem can be addressed using xlinkit, a lightweight framework for consistency checking that leverages standard Internet technologies. xlinkit provides flexibility, strong diagnostics, and support for distribution and document heterogeneity. We use xlinkit in a comprehensive case study that demonstrates how design, implementation and deployment information of an Enterprise JavaBeans system can be checked for consistency, and rechecked incrementally when changes are made.

Trends in Agent Communication Language

Agent technology is an exciting and important new way to create complex software systems. Agents blend many of the traditional properties of AI programs—knowledge–level reasoning, flexibility, proactiveness, goal–directedness, and so forth—with insights gained from distributed software engineering, machine learning, negotiation and teamwork theory, and the social sciences. An important part of the agent approach is the principle that agents (like humans) can function more effectively in groups that are characterized by cooperation and division of labor. Agent programs are designed to autonomously collaborate with each other in order to satisfy both their internal goals and the shared external demands generated by virtue of their participation in agent societies. This type of collaboration depends on a sophisticated system of inter–agent communication. The assumption that inter–agent communication is best handled through the explicit use of an agent communication language (ACL) underlies each of the articles in this special issue. In this introductory article, we will supply a brief background and introduction to the main topics in agent communication.

Function-class decomposition: a hybrid software engineering method

In addition to offering a simple yet powerful method for decomposing a system, function-class decomposition (FCD) produces an architecture that is more supportive than traditional object-oriented decomposition for several software engineering tasks. A hybrid method that integrates structured analysis with an OO approach, FCD identifies classes in parallel with decomposing the system into a hierarchy of functional modules. Recently, developers extended FCD to integrate UML concepts. Useful for partitioning a system for distribution, the FCD hierarchy provides a framework for controlling development in a distributed software engineering environment. It also helps identify and integrate components in component-based development and supports the system life-cycle maintenance phase. Further, FCD addresses many of the initial analysis and design problems inherent in large and complex OO systems. The authors' experience with testing FCD on several applications validates its compatibility with OO methodologies and modeling techniques.

An experience in collaborative software engineering education

Large-scale software development requires the interaction of specialists from different fields who must communicate their decisions and coordinate their activities. As global software development becomes mainstream, software engineers face new challenges for which they have received little or no training. To help a new generation of software developers better understand the industry's globalization and familiarize them with distributed, collaborative development, we designed a course entitled the Distributed Software Engineering Laboratory. In the class, pairs of students from different countries work as a virtual organization overseeing the whole software development process. We describe the lessons we have learned in this course and propose a framework useful in dealing with some of the difficulties participants face.

Understanding relationships among teleworkers' e-mail usage, e-mail richness perceptions, and e-mail productivity perceptions under a software engineering environment

This study was undertaken to investigate the use of e-mail and its implications under a telework environment for distributed software engineering. For this, the relative strength between a social influence and individual attributes in affecting teleworkers' e-mail use was studied. Management support was used as the representative social influence, and age, status, and ease of use represented individual attributes. An examination was also made on how e-mail use, individual attributes, and management support affected the perceptions of e-mail's information richness and e-mail productivity. Two different types of surveys, log sheets and perception-based self-reports, as well as interviews and e-mail correspondences composed the data sources. Three hierarchical regression models were defined and tested for the hypothesis validation. Data analysis indicated that management support was a much more powerful indicator for teleworkers' media use than individual characteristics. Furthermore, although labeled as a relatively lean medium from the media richness theory perspective, e-mail could become an effective and richer communication tool through an active social construction process of management support. Finally, the management support and perception of e-mail as a rich medium were both highly influential in creating teleworkers' positive perception on e-mail productivity. This study rendered a strong indication that effective adoption of e-mail by teleworkers as an information-rich medium could benefit distributed work and distributed organizations through enhanced work productivity.